This isn't a new trend. As we are all well aware, over the last ten years,
the average price of a pack of cigarettes has more than quadrupled, hitting
$8 in many places, like New York City. Across the country states are banning
cigarette smoking in bars and are using sin taxes to subsidize tax cuts
for the affluent, who could be the only people that can afford to smoke
if this trend continues for another decade.

While it's possible to find cheap smokes in a state like North Carolina,
where the average price of a pack is $3.15, or in Virginia, where the
state hasn't boosted cigarette taxes in 37 years, the simple fact is smokers
invariably end up buying cigarettes at the last minute. And at $8 a pop,
or 40 cents a smoke, it's getting patently ridiculous to pay a premium
to kill yourself, especially when you can't even smoke indoors anymore.

But if you think that's bad, try being one of the nation's millions of
incarcerated inmates -- many of which have been forced to quit cold turkey
in smoke-free prisons. Cigarettes in jail can cost as much as $40
a piece.

As with pruno, a prison
wine made from all manner of things, inmates have turned to common items
to get their fix, crafting smokes from dried spinach, spices and even
coffee grounds. And as with pruno, prisons have cracked down, with Kansas
prison officials removing spinach from the prison menu during a 1994 crackdown,
trying desperately to stop the practice.

In an interview with the Associated Press, explaining the change to prison
menus, Sgt. Ruth Divelbiss commented, "It smells terrible. You can't
print what it smells like. When you don't have tobacco, you do what you
have to do."

Indeed. Once again, The Black Table does what it has to do and doffs
the crash helmet to investigate further.

Cigarettes, or at least the idea of smoking crap out of a rolled
up bit of paper or leaves, have been around for thousands of years. Unlike
other inmate-inspired projects, like making pruno, rolling homemade cigarettes
is uncomplicated, provided you understand the basic steps, which are the
same whether you're rolling a Spinach Cig or a Menthol Knock-Off.

Start with the most basic, tried-and-true homemade smoke -- the spinach
cigarette. But before you can stop, drop, and roll that salad up, the
spinach needs to be dried out.

This is an ad.

1. Buy one pound of spinach and a newspaper you've never read
before, preferably something with a lot of names, numbers and places in
it. 2. Cover an article you can't comprehend with some leafy green
spinach and 3. feel good about combining two things that you don't
enjoy -- spinach and reading the business page -- in one activity designed
to mimic something you do enjoy, which is smoking. 4. Wait three
days for your spinach to learn all about how America's push for a strong
dollar may weaken economies around the globe, so that you can learn it
too, when you smoke the spinach.

By the time your spinach understands the economics of currency devaluation,
it should be completely dry. This will take your spinach about four days.
Once dried, it is completely possible to scrunch the spinach between your
fingertips, but those of you with a penant for using kitchen tools should
note the following directions.

1. Take the dried spinach, which will look exactly like weed and
2. throw it into that cute little blender/chop chop combo that
your parents got you when you moved into your "big new apartment"
and promptly lost all the pieces to, except for the blender, which is
where you keep your change after Margarita-Mania 2000 went horribly awry.
3. You will now have utterly useless, ground up, dried spinach.
Wee.

Step Two: Choose Your Paper

In prison, there are a many schools of thought on what to roll your cigarettes
with, but for our purposes, we will focus on just three:

Part One: The T.P. Method.

Many prefer to use toilet paper, which is easy to obtain, easy to roll
and extremely quick burning. Try to find a nice double- or triple-ply,
if you can, and avoid using quilted or ribbed papers, which may be harder
for newcomers to roll. While using toilet paper is the simplest method,
the end result is also the least desirable, looking like some cigarillo/tampon
hybrid that's hard to take a big pull off of.

1. Start by putting a small-to-medium sized amount of dried spinach
on the toilet paper, then carefully 2. fold the left side of the
paper over, 3. followed by the right side of the paper. Next, 4.
fold up the bottom, creating a little "pouch" for the dried
spinach, which 5. you can then roll up -- taking care not to rip
the paper like a useless clod -- into 6. a finished toilet paper-based
smoke.

Part Two: Adventures in Science Fiction.

Only extremely dedicated spinach smokers need apply for this method of
rolling, which uses pages from paperback books to wrap the spinach and
involves a complicated array of techniques and procedures. The process
may be long, but the end result is worth it, creating a tightly wound
smoke that you can read before lighting.

The absolute best paper to use in this kind of cigarette is the thin,
onion-skinned kind that is usually found in huge dictionaries or spiffy,

expensive versions of the Bible. Since we don't know what would happen
if you smoked Jesus -- and because we don't want to risk eternal damnation
to find out -- we highly recommend you use one of those old paperbacks
you have lying around.

Since we couldn't bear to set fire to our nine-volume set of Dragonlance
books, we turned to a slim volume called Slan, which was written
by A.E. van Vogt in 1946. In the novel, written in 1946, genetically-advanced
telepaths called "slans" are persecuted by ordinary folks and
targeted for death. All hell breaks loose when Jommy Cross, a nine-

year-old slan, visits the capital city of Centropolis, loses his mother
to anti-slan violence and gets involved in a plot to take down Kier Gray,
Earth's dictator.

Sounds smokable to us!

1. Start by cutting out a small strip of paper, about the size
of a cigarette rolling paper. We used part of chapter 10, when someone
points a gun at little Jommy and there are all these slan people around
and it's totally cool. Set aside this paper for later. 2. Grab
a big ol' stack of envelopes and 3. heavily lick the back of a
few of

them, which should make the
glue very tacky. 4. Use your finger to scrape the glue from the back
of the envelopes and 5. wipe it on the strip of paper you previously
set aside. 6. Place a small amount of spinach on the paper, reminding
yourself not to be a Greedy Gus

or you'll never get that thing rolled correctly. 7. Pinch the
paper together and start rolling it together, making sure not to let the
spinach hit the glue. 8. Right before you seal the cigarette, reactivate
the glue from the envelope to ensure a perfect seal. 9. You will
now have a cigarette that's also a sci-fi classic.

Part Three: You Lazy Sod!

Fine, so you're not the kind of person who wants to smoke toilet paper
and can't be bothered to scrape glue from the back of envelopes. Maybe
you're not in prison. Maybe you're a boring, middle class kid looking
for some kicks in a bag of spinach. Then by all means, please feel free
to go to the store and buy some rolling papers, but keep in mind you're
losing about a billion coolness points. Instead of doing some insane craft
project to make a cigarette from household items in an attempt to see
how it's done in prison, you're merely sitting around the house scheming
to smoke the spice rack.

1. Go buy some Zig Zags and
think about how lame you are for cutting corners. 2. Go ahead, roll
it up. 3. Lamer.

Extra Credit: There's More To This Than Spinach.

The Menthol Knock-Off: Menthol cigarette smokers are a different
breed, opting to smoke a cigarette whose flavor is derived, in part, from
fiberglass and all kinds of crap that even unfiltered smokers wince at.
So straight spinach ain't gonna cure their cravings. Take out some spinach,
mix in some dried mint, and viola -- a menthol smoke that doesn't have
insulation in it. Our panel of reviewers found this blend to "taste
minty in a bad way" with an aftertaste that was "like being
locked in a hair factory during a three alarm blaze."

The Grade Schooler: Back in the day, elementary school kids looking
for a kick would sell each other oregano in little bags and pass it off
for pot. Well, when you're in jail, oregano might as well *be* pot. Before
lighting, smokers found this classic blend to "smell like pizza smells
in scratch and sniff stickers," but upon lighting, the smoke was
"acrid and assy" giving the smoker "migraines for hours
and a stupid feeling that will linger for all eternity."

The English Special: Spinach can have a bit of a stinky aroma
for those unaccustomed to smoking crap rolled in crap and glued shut with
more crap. Perhaps these wimps are in need of a less full-flavored smoke?
This is where the billion tea bags you have lying around come in handy.
Instead of spinach, cut open a couple Earl Greys and go to town. Smokers
complained "there's too much of this tea shit coming into my mouth"
but noted that "the spinach doesn't reek because of the tea."
The tea cigarette "wasn't entirely unpleasant" but smokers "really
didn't want to do this anymore."

The Caffeinated Combo: For millions
of Americans, a cup of coffee and a cigarette was considered breakfast.
Well now you can simplify this process even further by smoking your coffee.
Coffee grounds, that is! Of all the blends, the coffee and spinach combo
"tasted most like a joint, albeit a very old joint" and "was
not completely awful by any means." While many said the "coffee
flavor isn't coming through too well," others noted that the spinach
"added an interesting topnote -- and that's always nice."